Sonic X Shadow Generations Shows the Right Way to Remaster a Game

Remakes and remasters are a point of contention these days, between the massive changes that sometimes come to beloved classics like Silent Hill 2, or a company like Sony remastering every game they’ve released that anyone has ever heard of, for a console that those games are already available on. We could argue all day about what the right way of handling these projects is, but as Sonic x Shadow Generations reminds us, there is at least a right way of doing things we should all be able to agree on. Taking a cue from Nintendo’s reintroduction of Super Mario 3D World for the Switch, Sega shines here, carefully tweaking the Sonic half of this 13-year-old title to bring it up to speed in both a literal and figurative sense, while also adding an enticing new portion of the package in Shadow’s half. And while this wasn’t the case with the Bowser’s Fury portion of Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, Shadow Generations is, frankly, the superior title of the two, to boot.

Sonic Generations was a good, albeit flawed game when it first released in 2011. The level design was solid, and at a time when there was quite a bit of criticism aimed at 3D Sonic releases following a five-year run of mostly disappointment, those sections here were instead praised. The game had its problems, though. It was maybe a little more ambitious than the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 could handle, in terms of speed combined with the graphical fidelity on display: Sonic Generations was an obviously beautiful game, and that took its toll on its performance. The frame rate topped out at 30 and regularly dropped, which was a problem for a title focused not just on speed, but on split-second decisions and necessary button presses that could doom you if your timing was off even a little bit. 

It also, just aesthetically and mechanically, took away from what Sonic is supposed to be: that feeling of blazing speed is diminished when it can’t keep up on screen. It’s a rarity to hear me discuss frame rate in a form other than “please stop whining about how you need everything to be at least 60 frames per second,” but the original version of Sonic Generations was noticeably jittery and inconsistent, which is not great for something that plays like a sci-fi racing game with looser controls. Sonic x Shadow Generations, however, runs at a smooth 30 FPS on Switch, and a try-to-keep-up 60 on Playstation 5 and Xbox. What a treat! It’s the game that it always should have been, which is to say, a modern Sonic game you don’t need to attach caveats to before praising. Like with Sonic Colors finally leaving its Wii-shaped prison, that’s worth commending. 

Now, you could get that same frame rate with backwards-compatibility on an Xbox Series X, using a copy of the original Sonic Generations for the Xbox 360, which also happens to be how I already knew, before starting Sonic x Shadow Generations, what this game was supposed to feel like, if only the technology had allowed for that back in 2011. However, Sonic x Shadow Generations goes beyond the admittedly impressive upscaling capabilities of the system to show off the game in its finest form yet. You can still tell this is a remaster and not a from-the-ground-up remake, sure, especially as the cutscenes, and the quality of the characters within them and their animations, certainly look more of a different time than of the present. The levels themselves, though, look the best they ever have, and are now available to far more than just the select group of people who bothered to check out what a 13-year-old game looked like on their Series X.

There is more than just a visual overhaul and better hardware to lean on here, as well. Downloadable content, such as the enjoyable diversion of the Casino Night Pinball table where Sonic is the pinball, is here from the start. There are lots of little changes that make for a better gameplay experience, as well: Sonic Generations was good, yes, but also full of frustrating deaths due to its heavy insistence on pitfalls and instant deaths and enemies that appear basically out of nowhere when you do actually get moving at a good, uninterrupted clip. Now, as a default, there are visual markers for said pitfalls, or paths you take where an instant death is possible, or enemies that are charging up a shot with a laser rifle, and so on. During stretches where failure to shift from side to side in the 3D levels would cause you to fall to your doom, a warning flashes telling you to press the left bumper or right bumper, depending. You used to have to see all of that coming on your own before, which again, things were not always rendered in a way where that was going to be obvious to you in time: Sonic Generations featured quite a few deaths where you’d only learn after the fact that you’d messed up, and would have to use that knowledge for next time. Which can be a frustrating interruption in a game where the only way to get an S-rank on a stage is to complete it without dying, on top of by having a bunch of rings and wrapping it in a timely fashion. 

In the end, you still need to react appropriately and on time to all of these prompts, so it’s not as if the game has taken anything out of your hands or made it shamefully easy or anything of the sort. They’re all designed to limit frustration more so than difficulty, to help keep the flow of the game going, in the same way the enhanced frame rate does. This is a welcome change, and Sonic Generations is an improved experience because of this light touch revision.

That being said, if you weren’t into Sonic Generations the first time around for reasons beyond its frame rate, that won’t have changed for you here: it’s the same game, for better or worse, where “better” applies most of the time, but “worse” continues to apply to its interminable—and even worse, boring—final boss fight. If you weren’t into the level design, or the story, or the challenges that start out fun but are mercifully mostly optional due to the sheer volume and length of some of them, you still won’t be here, as it’s a remaster, not a remake, and they remain the same. Sonic Generations, though, was enjoyed by plenty, so if you liked it the first time, here it is in its superior form—which is still not quite as good as Sonic Colors.

However! Shadow Generations is the real star of the show here, and worth a look. While it has its own minor weaknesses—the overworld is something of a blend of Sonic Generations’ style with that of Sonic Frontiers, owing to both its visual design as well as its open-world approach—the levels themselves are fantastic. This is the best Sonic has been in ages, and it doesn’t even feature the titular blue hedgehog in anything besides a cameo. As fast and pleasing as Sonic Generations levels feel in its remastered form, Shadow Generations is faster, built from-the-ground-up for hardware that can handle Sega’s ambition, which stretched beyond what they produced for the former. There is so much going on here, constantly, and nearly everything was designed with the idea of keeping you moving and active, and not feeling like you’re on rails. There are pitfalls and instant deaths, yes, but the moments for these are so much more obvious than they were in Sonic Generations that the literal signposting for them is gone. Instead, most of the time when you fall and you weren’t already out in a huge, open space over a canyon or what have you, you simply end up on an alternate path where you can keep pressing forward. These levels are expertly paced and tightly designed in a way that makes you wonder why anyone ever seriously pursued the idea of “open-world Sonic” to begin with, when they could have been doing something like this instead.

In addition to the superior level design, the pacing of the whole game is also improved: there are fewer acts before a boss this time around, since there’s less of Shadow’s history to revisit than there was Sonic’s, but there are far more non-optional challenge levels to complete in order to earn the keys to unlock the doors to those boss fights. Whereas Sonic Generations eventually made its challenge levels a bit unwieldy—honestly, who was excited about racing a doppelganger in a slow-paced, platforming-heavy late-game stage where earning an S-rank still took you around seven minutes—the challenges in Shadow Generations are always snappy, brief, to the point. Do X, and do it in one minute or less if you can. Here, do Y, and you’ve got 90 seconds for it. This makes them a welcome change of pace from the levels, which are admittedly on the longer side compared to all but the late-game of Sonic Generations. Though, given their design and quality, they never feel that way.  

Shadow Generations does some amazing things with its visuals, just from the sheer amount of detail that backgrounds have, or transition phases, or pure fidelity, and it all happens with the game running at a locked frame rate that’ll end up making you feel like you’re going roughly 1,000 miles per hour. When it’s all going as smoothly as possible, when you’re swapping between Shadow’s various powers as necessary and hitting those homing attacks and slamming down on that boost button in perfect sync with the stage’s progression, it’s truly wondrous. In a way, it’s a bit of a shame that Shadow Generations had to be attached to Sonic Generations like this in order to get it out there instead of having it sell on its own merits, but if this pairing is what it takes for people to give it a shot, then that was worth it. 

Again, this is akin to the Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury situation, although the quality of the games within are transposed. Super Mario 3D World was a tremendous Mario title for the Wii U, but no one owned a Wii U, so Nintendo re-released it in a remastered form for the Switch. A higher resolution and little tweaks like enhanced run speed weren’t enough for them to sell it alone in their minds, however, so, in the most extreme case of their Wii U-to-Switch remaster strategy, rather than adding an epilogue or including the DLC for free or what have you, Nintendo developed an entire new game to include with it: Bowser’s Fury. That title showed off either a one-off or a hint at the direction Mario could take with his next adventure, and its unique approach helped draw more eyeballs to what had been an underrated adventure for the platforming plumber.

Here, Sega is using Sonic Generations to bring people to what is actually the superior title in Shadow Generations, but the inclusion of the latter also should help sell people on the idea of revisiting the former in its improved form. There’s a symbiotic relationship here, and the beneficiary is the people who bother to experience it. You want to remaster a game? Do what Nintendo and Sega have done, and give people more than just a fresh coat of paint, or a slew of new options and features that could have been patched into the already available version of the title. The originals are still here, slightly tweaked in ways that make beneficial sense, and they’ve brought along something entirely new, too, something worth experiencing. If only more publishers would follow suit, we might not have to argue about the right way of doing things quite so much.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.